One Night in Bangkok…And the World’s Your Oyster

The title of this post is probably more appropriate for last week when I wrote about our evening dining experience at Nahm where Scotch and I ate fancy modern Thai food (the food was spicy so I ordered fried rice for Wee Scotch but the little bugger just wanted plain old white rice).

This is how the conversation went late last night as I lamented about my lack of creativity for a post title:

Ginger: Honey, I don’t have a title for this post other than, “Bangkok”.

Scotch: One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble.

Ginger: [Confused] But…who’s the hard man? And who’s being made humble?

Scotch: It’s a Pet Shop Boys song [starts singing song].

Ginger: Oh. Maybe I’ll leave out the hard and humble part…

And I was going to just leave it at that but then I googled the lyrics (the song is actually by Murray Head – thanks to a comment left by Benjamin) and quite liked the line about the “world’s your oyster.” Especially since I really do like oysters (raw, squeeze of lemon, sometimes with mignonette)…

So we were only in Bangkok for one night and part of a day which didn’t seem like a lot of time for a leisurely vacation that necessitated a morning lie-in followed by the mandatory sampling of the breakfast buffet.

We managed to squeeze in one tourist attraction to the Grand Palace which was beautiful, bright and dazzling and also housed the Emerald Buddha (which is actually made of jade).

I tried to pay attention to everything the tour guide was telling me about history, architecture, yada yada yada, but for the life of me, I can’t recall anything he told me that day except that the Emerald Buddha wore different outfits for the different seasons (summer, rainy, and cool).

When we were there in August, the Emerald Buddha was in his summer garb of a golden one-shoulder robe:

Emerald Buddha

Sightseeing outdoors in the Bangkok summer was hot (though not as hot as Dubai) but Scotch and Wee Scotch looked ever so cool:

At the Grand Palace

It was my first time in Thailand – I don’t know what I expected of Bangkok – maybe elephants and tigers roaming the streets? Kidding.

Well the city was like any other major one with shopping centers, financial districts, street vendors, and traffic.

Bangkok traffic with Tuk Tuk

On our one and only night in Bangkok, where we ate at Nahm at the Metropolitan hotel, we also had some pre-dinner cocktails.

I particularly enjoyed sipping this Siamjito which was was made with “premium Thai whiskey, brown sugar, lemon grass, ginger and lime” and am looking forward to re-creating it home one of these days. Of course I’ll be substituting Scotch for the Thai whiskey.

Siamjito

The drink looked nicely presented with all the little bits of fragrant lemongrass floating around but they kept clogging up my straw so eventually I had to bring the drink back to the bartender to have him strain it out for me.

When we were at the airport waiting for our flight back to Dubai, I wanted to buy a bottle of the Thai whiskey to take back with me but I thought of it after I had checked my bags. And since we were flying Qatar airlines (necessitating a stopover in Qatar) I wasn’t sure if I could carry liquids in my carry-on. Shame.

Mekhong Thai Whiskey

So that was the extent of our day and night in Bangkok which frankly was enough. We were very much looking forward to our beach destination of Phuket where we would be staying at the Indigo Pearl…perhaps the world is our oyster.